Note: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, just a rundown of the eras in horror comedy. Feel free to suggest titles, or whole epochs, that we may have missed out.

The 1920s stage plays

In the 1920s, playwrights decided to spice up their stage plays by adding more horror elements, creating silly haunted-house and monster stories like The Bat, The Cat & The Canary and The Gorilla. Some of these, like Canary, got adapted to silent movies. The 1925 Lon Chaney film The Monster also features a comic-relief character, but isn't really a full-fledged comedy.

Abbott And Costello And Laurel And Hardy And So On

In many ways, the 1930s and 1940s were the heyday of the "clean" horror comedy, which featured monsters without any real gore or violence. Laurel And Hardy did A Live Ghost in 1934, the haunted-house movie The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case in 1930 and A-Haunting We Will Go in 1942. The Three Stooges also dabbled in horror-comedy with short films like 1943's Spooks!. And then going into the 1940s, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bob Hope, among others, brought the genre to new prominence. There's also the hilariously titled Zombies On Broadway. Let's put on a show!

1960s Anarchy

The 1960s saw a slew of trippy novels, movies and TV shows in which horror elements often jostled with comedic ones — several of Peter Sellers' 1960s comedies often veer into horror at odd moments. At the same time, monster sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family ruled television with their zany portrayals of monsters who were just like us — almost. This was also the era that gave the start of the long-running Scooby Doo cartoons, and a slew of cute/funny images of monsters, from the Frankenberry cereal to the Count on Sesame Street.

Self-Aware Campiness

Susan Sontag published her famous essay on "camp" in 1964, but the 1970s really backed up the camp truck to our door, and dumped a load of glitter on our front steps. Horror comedy was no exception, with Vincent Price starring in two mega-campy Dr. Phibes movies, and other over-the-top horror films like Please Don't Eat My Mother and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes taking over cinemas. Most of all, Rocky Horror Picture Show became a defining movie for a whole ripped-fishnets-sporting generation.

The self-aware horror spoof genre took off way more in the early 1980s, with movies like Creepshow mocking the genre's cliches. And in general, the horror-comedy movie genre really came into its own in the 1980s, diversifying into a bunch of thriving sub-genres.

Ghostbusters, Gremlins and more

1984 saw the release of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins, sparking a new onslaught of cute/scary monsters and ghosts, including four (!) Critters movies. I'd also put 1986's Little Shop Of Horrors and Haunted Honeymoon into this category: wide-eyed protagonists coming face-to-tentacle with weird, slimy or fluffy-but-nasty creatures. According to Box Office Mojo, both Ghostbusters films and the first Gremlins occupy three out of the top four best-selling horror comedy slots of all time.

Troma comedies in the 1980s and beyond

Troma deserves its own category, for its sheer volume of output if for no other reason. Although it's best known for the Toxic Avenger films and Surf Nazis Must Die, there are just so many weird, over-the-top and just plain wrong Troma films out there, you could fill a bookshelf with the DVDs. And really, Troma is just the tip of the iceberg of a slew of direct-to-VHS and direct-to-DVD movies that we've seen in the past 20 years ago, with a ton of cult auteurs pushing the boundary between scary and funny.

1980s Werewolf/Vampire Humor

Teen Wolf (1985), An American Werewolf In London (1981), Fright Night (1985), Mr. Vampire (1985), Once Bitten (1985), Vamp (1986) and Love At First Bite (1979) were just some of the cocaine-fueled laughs at Universal monsters. Here's a photo of Grace Jones at a vampire strip club, from Vamp.

Body Horror/Comedy

The Reanimator films and Brian Yuzna's Society, among others, take the David Cronenberg trope of the human body being transformed into something gooey, icky or disturbingly awful, and they find the silliness and subversive humor that lurks just behind that, with gore, decapitated limbs still moving and lots of oozing goop all providing opportunities for slapstick and discomfort. The 1980s were also the heydey of Frank Hennenlotter's over-the-top violence and bodily destruction, in films like Basket Case. I'd also stick Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive into this category. In many ways, this genre has been the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced by the awesomeness of 2006's Slither.

The Rise Of Sam Raimi

Classic Sam Raimi films deserve their own category, especially the Evil Dead films and Army Of Darkness. Bruce Campbell in his prime, rocking the chainsaw hand, against the legions of dead. Good times.

Christopher Moore

No discussion of horror-comedy would be complete without mentioning the 1990s and 2000s novels of Christopher Moore, especially his vampire classics Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, You Suck: A Love Story, and Bite Me: A Love Story, plus his zombie Christmas tale The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale Of Christmas Horror.

Creature Features

Tremors (1990), Arachnophobia (1990), Lake Placid (1999) and Eight-Legged Freaks (2002) were just some of the slew of tongue-in-cheek monster-rampage films that came out in the 1990s and early 2000s. My fave is probably Lake Placid, just for the amazingly deadpan performances by Bill Paxton and Betty White, among others.

Buffy Etc.

Joss Whedon's Buffy empire, including a movie and two television series, pretty much deserves its own category, and it came along with a slew of other TV shows and books featuring (frequently female) heroines facing tongue-in-cheek magical/horrific threats, including Charmed and Xena: Warrior Princess.

The Chucky and Leprechaun Films

I have no idea where those fit in, so I'm putting them here. These are like the silly counterparts to the already quite silly Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger films. Chucky is a weird doll that comes to life and attacks people (I guess — I've only read a comic-book adaptation) and there have been a million films about a silly leprechaun going around disemboweling people and controlling their minds. And rapping. And dancing.

Horror Spoofs

The Scream films in the late 1990s jumpstarted the slasher-movie genre with their knowing humor and sly horror-movie references. And then with the release of Scary Movie in 2000, the floodgates opened. There have been a ton of horror spoofs, many of them with the word "Movie" at the end of their titles. Plus the upcoming Transylmania, which exactly one person is excited about. (And we know where you live.)

Zombie Rom-Coms

Shaun Of The Dead, Planet Terror, Jennifer's Body and Zombieland all, to some extent, use the reanimated dead as a backdrop for character-focused comedies. (Okay, so the rom-com thing in the subhed is stretching it slightly — they don't all feature love stories, exactly. But some of them do.) Zombie comedies that are less character-focused include the Nazi epic Dead Snow, the zombie slave masterpiece Fido, the zombie sheep masterpiece Black Sheep and the incredibly nasty Zombie Strippers. Plus Bruce La Bruce's Otto, Or Up With The Dead People. Oh, and there's also last year's Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead. No, really. There's also Jon Heder's webseries Woke Up Dead.

Meanwhile, in the world of books, many people see Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide as humorous, rather than as the indispensible handbook it is. There have also been a decent number of funny zombie books, including Breathers: A Zombie Lament by S.G. Browne, the mash-up Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, and several others.

Not entirely sure how it fits in, but horror spoof John Dies At The End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin (under a pseudonym) is selling like hotcakes on Amazon.

Sources include Wikipedia, BoxOfficeMojo, IMDB, Scared Silly and the book Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy by William Paul.

Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

This utterly bizarre scene comes from The Android Of Notre Dame, a Japanese horror gem released in the United States as part of the Guinea Pig series. This may actually be the worst Japanese horror film ever made, about the worst mad scientist in history — but luckily, the whole dreadful exercise only lasts 50 minutes.

The scientist is trying to save his sister, who's dying of a heart defect — and I'm not sure how reanimating dead women is supposed to help, much less mutilating their corpses for no reason. He does actually succeed in doing some real mad science, however. The guy who sold him the dead woman comes back and tries to blackmail him — so he kills the guy (cutting his legs off) and then reanimates his severed head as a kind of cyborg, whose eyes are video cameras and who controls a robot arm.

Here, the dead guy's girlfriend finds his cyborg severed head and is understandably upset. So when he wants to grope her breast with his robot arm, she figures she ought to let him. Bad, bad idea. Never, ever let your dead boyfriend grope you with his robot arm. This is rule number one for modern relationships:

In “Carrion Re-animating!” you play Herbert West and have captured and killed several of the local townsfolk for your depraved experiments. But when the relatives of your victims show up on your doorstep looking for their lost loved ones, you need to quickly reanimate the corpses before they call the police. If you match the wrong zombie with the wrong relative, the relative is zombie chow. If you are too slow in getting them their zombie, the relative calls the cops. A moustached narrator tells West’s story from an armchair, adding a touch of Masterpiece Theater to Lovecraft’s world.

The game is available as a free download from Zombie Cow Studios and is sadly Windows-only.

Carrion Re-animating! [Zombie Cow Studios via The Escapist]

Re-Animator

This adaption of Lovecraft's short story stars SF-favorite Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, a Miskatonic University medical student obsessed with curing death. Classic mad scientist territory. When his radical theories are met with resistance by the dean, he does what every good scientist would do - a series of secret experiments in his basement. After bringing his roomie's girlfriend's dead cat back to some semblance of life, clinical trials begin at the local morgue (with predictably gruesome results).

With the exception of one particularly disturbing scene (you'll know it when you see it), the film is gleefully gory. West dispatching a faculty member bent on stealing his work with a shovel to the head is par for the genre. Venomously hissing "plagiarist!" as he swings? Comedy gold.

While the dead aren't likely to shamble from their graves anytime soon, advances in resuscitation including therapeutic hypothermia have pushed back the medical point of no return, and recent evidence shows that perhaps much of the damage done to oxygen-starved brain cells is caused more by the sudden reintroduction of oxygen during a medical intervention than its deprivation. Rather than jump start an oxygen-starved brain with pure oxygen, we may instead want to more gently awaken the cells with gradual oxygenation. It'll have to do until West's glowing serum is perfected - "mindless homocidal madness" is one of those side effects that the FDA really frowns upon.

Mimic

Disease-fighting bioengineered insects that rapidly evolve into human-sized superbugs capable of mimicking humans. What's not to like? Mimickry is a survival mechanismrelatively common in nature. While it's extremely doubtful that such rapid changes could occur, I have to give them points for originality.

Alien

The life cycle of a xenomorph - egg, facehugger, chestburster, and fully-grown alien warrior - might seem needlessly complex, but there are parasites here on earth that make exploding out of John Hurt's chest look easy by comparison. Clonorchis sinensis, the liver fluke, passes through a snail and a fish before ending up inside one of us.

As unpleasant as an egg-implanting facehugger might be, at least it puts you to sleep. When the wasp Ampulex compressa finds its chosen prey, a cockroach, it uses its specially-designed stinger to perform a gruesome bit of brain surgery after an initial sting. The roach ends up with a dose of venom delivered directly into the part of its brain responsible for flight reflex. Once this is done, the roach is as docile as a lamb - the wasp grabs hold of its antenna and guides it home, where the roach gets a fatal wasp larva implantation. Facehuggers may be rather forward, but at least they don't ride you around like a sacrificial pony.

If you think that sort of behavior-tweaking couldn't happen in humans, keep in mind that quarter of Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite capable of making rats think that seeking out cats is a good idea. The parasite wants to get into the cat's stomach and doesn't much care how it gets there. Some research suggests that toxoplasma-infected humans are also affected - men become less intelligent and more withdrawn, while women become more outgoing and promiscuous.

It might also explain why Chekhov seemed so mopey after Khan stuck that worm in his ear.

After Diamond Distributors were sent a Cease and Desist order for distribution of the 15th, 16th and 17th issues of Devil Due's Hack/Slash series - Issues in which creator Tim Seeley's heroine Cassie Hack run into Stuart Gordon's version of Lovecraft's Herbert West as part of a storyline subtly titled "Cassie & Vlad Meet the Re-Animator" - publisher Devil's Due were informed that Diamond wouldn't be offering the issues to comic stores... which, due to the distributors' virtual monopoly on the market, meant that those issues wouldn't make it to comic stores at all (Diamond's Bill Schanes, Vice President of Purchasing, makes it clear that the decision was purely legal: "[W]e have been advised by Diamond's attorney's to not distribute issues #16 and #17 of the series Hack/Slash, plus process any additional reorders for #15 as well," he says in a press release on the subject).

The problem is apparently the question of who owns the right to offer merchandise on the Re-Animator movies. Brian Yuzna, producer of the movies, is somewhat surprised that it's not him:

Devil's Due have done a fantastic job of keeping the spirit of the Re-Animator films alive in the Hack/Slash cross-over... It has been a pleasure to collaborate with such a talented crew. And I am proud to be working with them after the admirable stand they have taken in the face of economic coercion. This company exemplifies the independent spirit of the genre film and comics community. It may seem crazy to Re-Animator fans to think that a company that had nothing to do with the classic films could actually claim ownership of the "Re-Animator" brand and threaten to stop anyone else from creating comics, films or merchandise with the word 'reanimator' or 're-animator' in it- even the actual producer of the films that created the brand—but in this wacky world that is exactly what has happened.

So who is this company that "had nothing to do with the classic films" that's causing the problem? That would be Re-Animator LLC, a company that filed for trademark on "Re-Animator" on April 20th, 2005 courtesy of lawyer Michael Lovitz - a man who's previously written a book about comic book trademark and copyright law and hosted a series of workshops at the San Diego Comic-Con called Comic Book Law School for years. While the identity of those behind Re-Animator LLC remains unconfirmed, Lovitz has also filed for many other trademarks over the years that have been related to comics published by Dynamite Entertainment (amongst them Jungle Girl, Savage Tales and characters from the Project Superpowers series) - a company that has published its own Re-Animator comics.

No matter whoever is behind the C&D order, Devil's Due isn't backing down. Company president Josh Blaylock:

We deliberated internally long and hard, but this was in good conscience not something I felt we could roll over and just accept. I've reviewed the facts, spoken to copyright, corporate and entertainment attorneys, and resolved that this, in my own personal opinion, is a ridiculous bully tactic that only hurts Tim [Seeley, Hack/Slash creator] and all of the creators who work so hard to make Hack/Slash the great book that it is and abuses the Diamond policy of staying out of legal issues.

The result? Devil's Due will be distributing the issues themselves directly to retailers, offering discounts of between 50 - 60% off cover price to those who choose to order from their website; post #17, the series will return to Diamond Distribution. But as for any future appearances of Herbert West...? Well, I'm sure the lawyers will do Lovecraft proud in terms of creative tortures necessary to make that happen.

[Devil's Due Publishing]

So here's the deal. The bad guy Dr. Hill is an evil surgeon whose head has been chopped off. Lucky for him, his head and body have been reanimated by mad scientist Dr. West (Jeffrey Combs, looking young and alarmingly tasty). Dr. Hill has control over his headless body, and has also discovered that other reanimated zombies obey his thoughts. So he decides to use his newfound power to get busy with the Dean's daughter, who is also a scientist at the medical school. Still more luck for Hill — the Dean is a zombie, and he happily fetches his daughter for Hill to molest in his lab. Serious creepiness ensues. Plus, the pun! So funny. This scene, which I first saw at the age of sixteen, is probably what made me the person I am today. [Re-Animator]

Commenter OMG-Ponies proclaimed the other day that the only true zombies come from "voodoo or Jesus," not science. But as champions of a rational, scientific view, we disagree, of course. And here's the list to prove it:

Reanimator. A mad scientist, Herbert, invents a "re-agent" serum that brings the dead back to life in this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. It starts with cats and devolves into zombie heads and rampaging corpses. Here's a gross and possibly disturbing zombie head scene:

World War Z by Max Brooks. A plague causes a zombie outbreak, which starts in China and spreads around the world. At first people think it's a type of rabies, but they soon realize it's an unstoppable pandemic that resurrects the newly dead.

Fido. This 2007 movie never really explains how the zombie plague happened, but it's definitely science fiction. The last survivors of humanity live in fenced-in bubbles of normality and turn zombies into their slaves using electrical collars. The collars neutralize the zombies' aggression and turn them docile and obedient. It's this weird paternalistic 1950s pastiche where your newly dead loved-ones become your mindless servants. There may be some social commentary buried in there.

28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Two movies with slightly different takes on the same premise: well-meaning scientists create a plague that turns people into monsters. They're not technically undead, but they growl, eat human flesh and rampage just like zombies. In 28 Days Later, their bite turns you into one of them, which is much more zombie-like. In both cases, it starts in the laboratory and ends with pale mutants biting you.

Night of the Living Dead. This one's a bit iffy. At one point, a scientist suggests that radiation from a returning Venus probe may be responsible for the zombie outbreaks. But director George Romero later disavowed this explanation.

Planet Terror. The better half of Grindhouse (sorry, Quentin) features a toxic gas called DC-2, aka Project Terror. A bioweapon deal gone wrong releases some of the fumes onto a sleepy town in Texas, and soon everybody is turning into horrendous zombies. A few people are immune, and you can delay the effects of the process by exposing yourself to the gas again.

Zombie Prom. A lovestruck teenager throws himself into a nuclear cooling tower, only to return as the Atomic Zombie. Reunited with his sweetheart, he wants to attend the high school prom, but principal Delilah Strict (RuPaul!) harbors anti-zombie prejudices. This musical short film is yet another 1950s pastiche, possibly harboring more social commentary. Here's the trailer:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The monster is a collection of dead body parts, and Victor Frankenstein zaps him to unlife using a modern science, including electricity and chemistry, mixed with old-school alchemy. Okay, so the monster doesn't go around turning others into zombies, and he's conscious and intelligent in the book. But he acts quite zombie-like in most of the movies, except Kenneth Branagh's. Call him a zombie outlier.

Resident Evil. In the movies, at least, the evil Umbrella Corp. creates viruses to use as biological weapons. The deadly T-virus is later turned into a cosmetic cream to restore your dead skin cells, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning tons of people into contagious zombies. And cosmetics company Olay recently started marketing a rejuvenating product that looks just like it.

The latest idea is too on the nose, because it's about a vice president who has a heart attack and dies, which is terrible, because he runs the country, and a kind of Karl Rove-ian character brings Herbert to the White House to revive him. All is well for a little while, and then, of course, havoc has its day. A lot of people they took the idea to didn't want to touch it. And, of course, the real power in it would be to get it out before they are out of power.

OK, why the fuck did Uwe goddamn Boll get to direct a gory political satire (the wretched Postal), but Stuart Gordon - who actually has a brain and some writing ability - doesn't? What the hell, people? I think the problem is that Hollywood doesn't want progressive politics in movies to offend the delicate white liberal sensibility. Politics should be sanctimonious, and no bodily fluids should be involved. Somebody like Michael Moore gets to make "funny" political movies because he's actually an irritating dogmatist who is boring to watch, but Gordon - who threatens to entertain us - is being told zombies are just too political for the B-movie crowd.

Famous names: Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs

Crunchy goodness: 5

Sight you'll never unsee: After West decapitates and reanimates his rival Dr. Hill, the headless undead doctor carries his head around in a bowling bag and kidnaps a young woman he's taken a fancy to. Hill strips her, straps her to a medical table, and then - well, let's just say he gives new meaning to the phrase "giving head."

Sequels: Followed by Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator, both directed by Gordon pal Brian Yuzna, who memorably includes a zombie rat vs. zombie penis sequence in Beyond Re-Animator. Gordon returns to the franchise in 2008 with House of Re-Animator, starring William H. Macy as the president, who gets involved in re-animation shenanigans.

Most memorable product tie-in: In The 4400, Jeffrey Combs (our beloved Herbert West) plays a mad doctor who invents a glowing green serum that he injects into people with a giant syringe to give them mutant powers. The glowing green syringe is a near-replica of the one he uses in the Re-Animator movies.

Reanimator - Fansite with many extras including the original short story.